The Increasing Implications of Economic Principles for Individual, Business, and Societal Choices - Essay Example

The relative assessments of the economic arrangements are, to be certain, innately hypothetical for two explanations (Feldman & Serrano 2005): first, they are hypothetical due to the hypothetical feature of the theories on which they are founded; second, they are hypothetical because practical limits on the individual, business, and societal choices cannot be merely understood as proof of a breach of the rules of deliberate individual, business, and societal choices. These are the main reasons economic principles become increasingly important nowadays.

For the two explanations abovementioned, the hypothetical assessments of other economic structures are constantly open to questions from both parts: they could be assessed because economic principles about the operating components of institutions are discovered to be insufficient or to be inappropriately used. And they could be assessed because they wrongly analyze the unconscious or conscious feature of the ‘constitutional choices’ (Feldman & Serrano 2005, 64) that have situated the society, businesses, and individuals in a specific institutional context. However, the reality that the comparative assessments of economic institutions and principles will constantly be hypothetical and open to questioning in this way has one more repercussion: so long as there is no major opposition to the theories, and so long as there is no opposing proof to the dominant interpretation of the particular individual’s, business’s, and society’s constitutional interests and the unconscious or conscious character of their choices, as long as the temporary evaluation may properly be declared to be the most justifiable and well-substantiated hypothesis insight.  

This kind of hypothetical comparative assessment can be used for all forms of economic structures: it can be used for institutions and principles that are the product of ‘natural development’, and to those that have been intentionally recognized. And it can be used for the wide-ranging economic principles that guide market forces, at least for the organizational-constitutional principles that rule structured general arrangements. Theories of the operating components of social and economic institutions serve a fundamental function in the assessments of other economic structures. As a result, the economic principles that generate such theories are a major root of information for the attempts in the comparative organizational and constitutional assessment of choices.

Specifically, obviously, not to claim that practitioners of economics could profess to be better evaluators of the appeal of other institutional structures, more ‘superior’ than the society, business, and individuals themselves who are to exist within these structures. However, due to the important function that theoretical perspective serves in any comparative assessment of economic institutions and principles, there is a substantial component of ‘truth-judgment’ (Buchanan 1977, 213) required in these assessments. And one could quite be cynical about the level to which the ‘final evaluators’, the society, business, and individuals themselves, may be supposed to be directed, in their own assessments of other institutions, by a knowledgeable understanding of the concrete operating components of the economic alternatives.

The economist’s ‘comparative institutional analysis and evaluation’ (Buchanan 1977, 218) cannot claim superiority over the own value judgments and choices of individuals, businesses, and society about the form of institutional settings wherein they desire to live. Specifically, the economist’s assessments cannot be more than hypothetical interpretations, interpretations that are not merely open to questioning within the academe, as all hypothetical ideas are, but, primarily, are open to the final assessment of whether they embody the assessments of the individuals, business, and the larger society involved.

The reality that the individuals, organizations, and the society cannot constantly be supposed to anchor their assessments of other institutions on knowledgeable assumptions about their particular operating components does in no way mean that a scientific, knowledgeable practitioner or scholar should be allowed to enforce its perception of what good economic institutions are, on the inadequately knowledgeable ones. The issue of ‘ignorance about the working out of social rules’ (Buchanan 1977, 224) on the individual’s side can merely offer a premise in support of the institutional mechanisms that guarantee to resolve that issue, if merely to a degree, without hampering the function of the individual as the final judges on the constitutional-organizational paradigm wherein they desire to subsist, presents an argument for legal requirements that allow and encourage individuals to make knowledgeable choices, jointly and independently, among institutional options.

And, finally, economic principles assign a major function to applied social discipline, specifically, to enlighten individuals, businesses, and the larger society, and, thus to allow them more productively to pursue their choices in the domain of constitutional-organizational choice.